Setting up mappings: -mapfrom and -maptoReferenceGeneral syntaxSyntax of URLs

Syntax of URLs

This section gives some detail on the syntax of URLs, as used by Big Brother. These rules should be obeyed when supplying URLs to Big Brother.

There are two kinds of URLs: remote (http) and local (file) URLs. Remote URLs have the following syntax:

http:// server name / relative path

Under Unix, local URLs are of the form

file:/// relative path

Under Windows, they are of the form

file:// drive / relative path

A drive is a letter followed by a colon. A relative path is a sequence of directory or file names, separated by slashes, and possibly ending with a slash.

These rules correspond to absolute URLs. A URL can also be relative, that is, depend on another URL. In that case, it only consists of a relative path, such as ../pics/bob.gif. Note that some characters are illegal in URLs and must be encoded using a percent sign followed by their hexadecimal ASCII code. For instance, if a URL contains a space, it should be encoded as %20.

François Pottier, May 5, 2004

Setting up mappings: -mapfrom and -maptoReferenceGeneral syntaxSyntax of URLs